How much data does music streaming use? (2018 edition)

We take a look at the data usage for the major music streaming services in Australia.

Unlike most major video streaming services, music streaming services often don’t make the exact data requirements for audio playback easily available to browse.

This is quite possibly a necessary practice, due to a mix of using different codecs and various audio bitrates, where larger numbers can sometimes erroneously be associated with better quality.

Thankfully, music streaming providers are more willing to talk about the audio bitrates, which means, with a bit of maths, we can determine a rough idea of data usage in practical scenarios for the major services in Australia.

Google Play Music

Playback options for Google Play Music are separated into three categories: Low, Normal, and High.

The bitrate associated with these categories may vary based on available bandwidth but, in basic terms, ‘Low’ ranges from 96kbps to 128kbps, ‘Normal’ extends up to 256kbps, and ‘High’ reaches up to 320kbps.

Extending these numbers out, an hour of music streaming on Low quality could use between 43MB and 58MB.

The ‘Normal’ quality setting on Google Play Music is the same as Apple Music in terms of data usage, and weighs in at roughly 115MB per hour, if you take the given bitrate as a base.

High quality settings on Google Play Music use approximately 144MB of data per hour.

To listen to one gigabyte of streamed music on Google Play Music, then, you’d have to listen to roughly 17 to 23 hours on Low, around 8.5 hours on Normal, and just shy of approximately seven hours on High.

Also, by signing up to YouTube Red, you automatically get a Google Play Music subscription thrown in.

‘Balanced’ automatically boosts Wi-Fi playback to 320kbps, which is the same bitrate as ‘Enhanced’.

These two quality presets use around 144MB per hour of streamed music.

‘Custom’ drops audio playback to 64kbps, and uses around 29MB per hour of music playback.

To use one gigabyte of data on Deezer, it would take roughly more than 34 hours of streaming on ‘Custom’, approximately 17 hours on ‘Compact’, and close to seven hours on ‘Balanced’ and ‘Enhanced’.

How much monthly data do I need?

In terms of streaming music in your home, the monthly data requirement will vary depending on which services you use and how frequently you stream music.

Even at the highest possible streaming quality, it’ll take roughly 8.5 hours of Apple Music streaming to use one gigabyte of data, and around seven hours apiece for Spotify and Google Play Music.

That’s a lot of tunes for a gigabyte of data.

Pushed to the highest quality, our YouTube Red estimates suggest only four hours per gigabyte of streamed audio, and with Tidal you’ll definitely want to consider the 1.5-hours-per-gigabyte for 1411kbps streaming.

On the other end of the spectrum, fixed-bitrate music streaming services like SoundCloud and iHeartRadio offer up to around 17 hours of playback per gigabyte of data.

Where you fall on the audio-quality scale – either happy with radio-quality bitrate or a fidelity-loving audiophile – will determine your household data needs for streaming music.